


Tightly Knotted to a Similar String

by fellowshipofthefandoms



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Bucky barnes is my sad gay son, F/M, I just have a lot of feelings about Steve mcfrikin rogers, M/M, Steve and nat are the two best friends ever they have twin souls, Steve is a sadboi, Steve loves Bucky a whole damn lot, also nat, and kinda tony, and peggy, and wanda, multi-movie fic, steve rogers character study, this one runs the whole gamut folks, warning: mentions on suicidal thoughts and actions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 18:17:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14816414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fellowshipofthefandoms/pseuds/fellowshipofthefandoms
Summary: "Bucky?""Who the hell is Bucky?"Death no longer holds meaning for you.





	Tightly Knotted to a Similar String

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: this fic does contain descriptions of suicidal thoughts and actions (because Steve is very sad and very reckless and I decided to explore that further)
> 
> Literally a million trillion thanks to my buddy Clare who was my sounding board for this fic. She is an all-around badass who loves Stevie just as much as I do. Her input was invaluable and this story wouldn't be half of what it is without her.
> 
> The title is taken from Jane Eyre (another amazing suggestion from Clare) and comes from this quote, which I find extremely applicable to the relationship between Steve and Bucky: "I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I'm afraid that cord of communion would snap. And I have a notion that I'd take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you'd forget me."

“We don’t trade lives,” you say, and Vision smiles at you, softly and sadly, disappointed and yet also glad to be considered a life.

 

Everyone else either sighs in relief or resignation, but no one raises any objection.

 

You sigh, too.

* * *

 

Your mother keeps you fed as best she can during the Depression, but you are poor, and things fall through the cracks. Sarah bemoans how pronounced your little ribs are getting and how she thinks she can practically see your heart fluttering inside your chest.

 

She comes home one day to find you feeding scraps of food, just crumbs and rinds, truly, to the mangy stray cats that have taken up residence on the fire escape.

 

Sarah looks at you with endless fondness and exasperation. “Now Stevie, don’t go feeding those animals our food, because they are only going to come back tomorrow and the next day, and we don’t really have any to spare.”

 

You look at her sadly.

 

“It’s them or you, honey. You need that food, okay?”

 

You nod and try to ignore the yowling of the cats through the night. Two days later you are feeding them again.

* * *

 

You pass by an alley on the way home and hear a soft whimper that could be nothing and could be something. When you go closer to investigate you see a man holding a woman against the brick wall, his grubby hand over her mouth, her eyes squeezed shut in pain or fear.

 

“Hey!” you shout, cataloguing how much bigger, taller, and stronger the man is than you and decide to confront him anyways.

 

“Get lost, kid,” he says, and you see red at the thought that he expects you to just leave and let him hurt her.

 

You rush forward and use all your body weight and momentum to push him sideways. You yell “run!” to the woman but don’t turn around, keeping all your attention on the furious man in front of you.

 

His first swings don’t land, and you manage a jab in the area of his kidney, but one wild punch catches you below the chin, and one is all it takes. You’re on your back and the man is battering your face into the concrete. You manage to look and see that the girl is nowhere to be seen.

 

_Good,_ you think, _at least it’s me and not her_.

 

You fall unconscious.

 

Bucky saves you, because he always does. He heard the woman yelling hysterically for help and knew it was you.

 

“Don’t do that again,” he says, patching you up.

 

“Okay,” you say, lying.

* * *

 

You feel a steady draw towards Bucky, like there is an invisible string attached to both of you that pulls you back together even when you’re apart.

 

You’ve lost count of how many scrapes Bucky has gotten you out of, and you can find no other explanation for his uncanny ability to find you no matter where you are.

 

Sometimes, when he is near you, you feel the pull. The string tugs on the inside of your ribs and you have to pull yourself back from running your hand through his hair, placing your palm against his chest, putting your arms around his neck so he can lift you up like he would a girl.

 

The night he leaves the pull is so strong, when he calls you a punk and hugs you goodbye you want to put your mouth to his neck, do anything to keep him there in your arms, but you don’t, and he leaves.

 

It’s like the string has snapped.

* * *

 

 

“Do you want to kill Nazis?” Erksine asks, with a hint of irony, but not unkindly.

 

You don’t want to kill anyone, and you want to save soldiers and civilians from dying. At the time the two seemed to be mutually exclusive.

 

Later, in the war, you realize that there is no way to save everyone. Someone’s life always has to be given for another. The great trade to the powers that be.

* * *

 

At Camp Lehigh you are tried and battered and bullied and bruised, but you have never felt stronger or more alive.

 

The training often strikes you with how macabre it is, this rehearsal for death. You see it in the eyes of every man there, no matter how much they boast and brag, the resignation and steely determination to go to their deaths.

 

Laying down one’s life for country, for family, for freedom, it all comes down to the same thing. Trading one life for another, trading thousands of lives for millions of others.

 

You see the grenade and throw your body at it before your mind can form a coherent thought of what to do. It’s not a death in battle but it is in the service of others, you manage to think before it inevitably rips through your viscera and muscles and bones.

 

_For the men, for Agent Carter_ , you think, and you are glad to do this, to be useful in this way.

 

The seconds tick by and the grenade doesn’t go off, and you sit up, dazed, and say, “Is this a test?”

 

You know it is, and you know the only way to pass: be willing to give your life for another, for many others.

 

Erksine smiles.

* * *

 

 

You hear the name of Bucky’s company and you feel something thrumming through you, a terrible, aweing rush of feeling. Purpose.

 

Peggy tries to stop you, rather halfheartedly, and God is it good to see her again, but even the heavy look in her eyes is not enough to turn you away. She understands quickly that nothing could stop you, and you fall in love with her just a little more as she requisitions an aircraft and a pilot and rides with you despite the flak piercing through the hull of the fighter.

 

You feel for a moment, surprisingly, jealousy listening to Stark talk to her with the easy flirtation of a man who very much knows how to talk to women.

 

And then you jump out of the plane and forget Peggy and Stark entirely.

 

War is uglier than you thought it would be, much different from the war-time films at the pictures, but as soon as your legs hit the ground and you run due west towards the target you feel an elation unlike anything you have ever felt before. You don’t take pleasure in hurting or killing, but you can feel yourself being drawn in by power as you drop soldiers one by one who all seem like they are moving in slow motion.

 

Nothing can touch you.

 

You are alive.

 

You free the men and go in search of Bucky, feeling in your bones, in the crackling of electricity on your tongue, that the factory is going to blow up. The deeper into the factory you go the surer you are that you won’t have time to make it out, but even dying next to Bucky’s dead body, knowing you did all you could to save him, is better than the alternative of leaving him behind.

 

Then, impossibly, you hear something.

 

“Sergeant. 32557…”

 

When you find him, you feel the vice grip around your heart relax.

 

“Steve?”

 

He’s here, alive, and saying your name and the string _yanks_ you to him and you want to shout and dance and hold him until kingdom come, but you don’t.

 

“I thought you were _dead_ ,” you say, furious at him and also thinking, with desperate irony, that this is how he must have felt every time you got in a scrape or fluid filled up your lungs or frost crept up the side of the radiator and you wouldn’t stop shivering.

 

“I thought you were smaller”

 

You want to laugh, hysterically, but instead you haul him off the table and respond with little quips while trying to get him out of there. Because you had been completely willing to die searching for him, but you will not allow him to die in here, this place where he was tortured and caged like an animal.

 

Schmidt comes as a surprise, and you can feel yourself teetering, wanting to give in to the power and use it to take what you want. _The weak man knows the value of strength,_ Erksine had said, because he had believed you to be unselfish.

 

“We have left humanity behind.”

 

You know you have the ability to do things no human man could do, and you think Schmidt may be right.

 

He gets away as the factory crumbles around you, and you feel relief and peace when Bucky reaches the other side safely. You did your part, gave yourself for him and for the other men, and you look across the chasm at Bucky, glad his face will be the last you ever see.

 

But, of course, the idiot doesn’t leave.

 

So, you save yourself to save him, and walk thirty miles through enemy lines to arrive back at the camp, Lazarus victorious, every man with you having been declared dead.

* * *

 

“It’s like you’re trying to get yourself killed,” Bucky says, in a deliberately casual tone. A couple of the other Commandos chuckle.

 

You’re all sitting around a fire in some backwoods in Italy, waiting on intel on your next target. Morita is setting your arm. You broke it on the last mission because of falling debris. The other men had all gotten out, but you wanted to find information on Hydra before the place came down around you. It’s not the first time.

 

Bucky is looking at you straight on, a little bit angry and little bit sad.

 

You reply lightly. “I’m not trying to get killed, just making sure the job gets done.”

 

Bucky’s composure slips. “Well maybe you’re not as invincible as you think.”

 

He gets up and leaves the fire, and you watch him stomp into the woods. You remember, vividly, him asking you time and time again to stop risking your life in back alleys, and you lying to him until he realized you never would stop.

 

But this isn’t a back alley.

 

And you think that you may actually be invincible, and it scares you worse than Hydra and the Nazis and the whole damn war combined.

 

You leave him for a few hours, but you go to him soon enough. You never were able to hold a grudge or let an argument linger. It’s something Buck would always tease you about because you would confront him before you each went to sleep because you refused to let bad feelings fester overnight.

 

“I didn’t agree to come with you just to watch you die in some goddamn blaze of glory,” he says without turning around, knowing it’s you.

 

You feel it again, the inescapable pull towards him. You clench your fists.

 

“I know, Buck.”

 

“They told me I was done. Out of the war for good, and I gave that up to come on these crazy missions.” He turns and pokes you in the chest. “For _you_.”

 

You think for a moment, looking at him, that despite his anger and frustration with you he feels the string, too. It pulls your bodies closer together and pulls eyes to glance down at lips.

 

“And I’m glad you’re here,” you say, deciding not to make any excuses for yourself.

 

“I joined the army happily knowing you were safe at home. And now I spend every waking moment trying to prevent you from getting blown to fuckin’ pieces!”

 

You are standing so close now, and you’ve forgotten what started this in the first place because he’s looking up at you and breathing hard and you can’t form a single coherent thought.

 

“I just wanted that perfect after for you, Steve,” he says, stepping away and breaking the spell, “the wife and kids in a nice brownstone back in Brooklyn with heat and no mold and not too many stairs.”

 

_After,_ you think. You never thought there could possibly be an after in this war.

 

But then again, you think you are heading towards it whether you want to or not.

* * *

 

 

You see it in his eyes the second before he lets go, the realization that he won’t be able to hold on, that this time, you won’t be able to save him, and it’s worse than hearing him scream as he falls to his death.

 

You want, more than anything, to follow him down. All you have to do is let go. But you don’t. You hang on, and pull yourself back into the train car, tooth and nail, blood and bones, and lay there for a long moment.

 

The reason you didn’t let go, the reason you never voice, is that you knew the fall wouldn’t kill you, so what would be the point?

 

You evaded death so long you became unkillable. A punishment that horribly, terribly, fits the crime.

* * *

 

 

_One last mission,_ you think as you prepare to storm Schmidt’s base and eradicate Hydra, finally fulfilling your purpose.

 

You won’t let any of the Commandos die here. They deserve to reap the benefits of their war.

 

_One last mission._

 

The SSR takes the base and you chase after Schmidt’s plane. You kiss Peggy, selfishly, knowing you can never have the mundane post-war life that she deserves, and you follow Schmidt into the air.

 

_One last mission._

 

You stop the bombers from reaching their targets and climb up to the cockpit. You know the Tesseract is not what made you, but its power feels sinisterly familiar.

 

“You could have the power of the gods!” Schmidt screams, unhinged and defeated. But you already have that power, because what is a god if not a being that can never die?

 

He dies horribly, and you let the Tesseract fall into the ocean, praying no one ever finds it.

 

_One last mission._

 

You reach Peggy and want to just tell her you’re sorry, apologize for her loving a doomed man, but instead you spin falsehoods, and she cries for you.

 

_One last mission._

You steer the Valkyrie downward, into the ice below, and you pray.

 

The plane hits the ice, hard, but of course you are not knocked unconscious or killed on impact. You pray for the bombs to go off or the plane to cave in, but as the moments tick by all that happens in a steady, slow sinking, and icy water begins to fill the cockpit.

 

_One last mission, please God, let this be my one last mission._

 

You succumb, to the cold or to the water.

* * *

 

 

And then you wake up. _After_ , you think.

* * *

 

 

“I didn’t see an end, so I put a bullet in my mouth and the other guy spit it out.” Bruce is angry and desperate, and you realize that the two of you are the same.

 

You were both created by the same thing, the same science designed to make man into gods. And though you know that Bruce was created by his own hand, he is cursed in the same way you are.

 

_Me, too._ You want to say, to tell him that you have tried and tried, in less direct ways, but you realized long before he did that the serum was not going to let you die.

 

You think, later, when the smoke clears, after seeing first-hand what the Hulk can do, that he is possibly the only thing that can kill you. But you could never ask that of him, force him to give up what humanity he has left, so instead you stay silent and keep Bruce at an arm’s length, knowing your combined pain would be too much for either of you.

* * *

 

 

You watch Tony fly through the hole in the sky and think that maybe being a hero has nothing to do with fancy gadgets and super serum and years of training and everything to do with the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for others. You have the strange urge, decades old and bones-deep, to salute Tony as he flies to his death.

 

And then he falls, and somehow lives, and you think maybe you’re all doomed to live forever.

* * *

 

 

SHIELD missions offer no challenge to you, no real risk of the battering and gore of the war. They are too clean, too well executed. And you and your team are just too good.

 

Then, as SHIELD starts to crumble and you watch bullets rip through Nick Fury’s body like paper you think, guiltily, _Finally, a worthy challenge._

When the man catches your shield and you hear the _shunk_ of metal against metal, you feel a rush of what could only be ecstasy run through you. Only someone as strong as you could catch your shield. With that arm he may be even stronger.

 

He throws it back at you and the heavy blow hits you in the gut, the first time anyone has made you falter in a very long time. It’s the first time you’ve felt alive since aliens poured out of the sky.

 

Natasha tells you about him, about how dangerous he is, and you don’t want anyone to get hurt, but you can stop the rush of adrenalin and pleasure that comes from an actual, tangible _risk._

* * *

 

You find yourself, completely involuntarily, coming to love Natasha. There is something in her that is familiar to you, in the way she jokes and postures while still always scanning and analyzing.

 

“Believe it or not, it’s kind of hard to find someone with shared life experience,” you tell her. It’s why you spend so much time with Peggy even though she only remembers you half the time. No one in this world knows the man you really are, a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, and you don’t let anyone close enough to find out.

 

“You just make something up,” she tells you, and you want to tell her that though she may think you are bad at lying, you’ve been doing a pretty good job of convincing people you are this soldier, stoic and courageous.

 

_Everything special about you came out of a bottle._ Tony’s words echo in your head. Maybe he was right, because you’ve forgotten what it was like to be a real man.

 

“Who do you want me to be?” she asks you.

 

All that she is may not have come out of a bottle, but you think she has forgotten what it is to be a person, too. It’s why you both spend all your time trying to save humanity, in an effort to remember what it was like to be truly, terribly human.

 

“How about a friend?” you reply. It’s been so long since you’ve had a friend, just a friend, instead of a comrade or a teammate.

 

She laughs at you, but you think you can see beneath her veneer that she yearns for that human connection, too.

* * *

 

 

You should have known that no one was really dead. Or no one stayed dead, rather.

 

Zola’s slimy voice coming through the computers makes rage well up inside you, and the knowledge that everything Peggy built, everything you had fought for, had been corrupted by letting in the very thing you had died, you had _all_ died, to stop. And for what? For power? For innovation?

 

You punch the monitor, surprised by the force of your anger.

 

Zola shows you the consequences of it, the useless deaths, Tony’s parents, Fury, civilians lost in war, good men lost in fights engineered by Hydra. You wish, not for the first time, that you had not spent the last 70 years frozen in ice.

 

Nat tells you about the missile, and you hear Zola’s pixelated laughter as you dive for cover. You fold your body around Nat’s, using the shield to protect you both but preparing to take the brunt of the blow for her. You are reminded of another time, at this very camp, where you used your body, your flesh and blood and bone, in an effort to protect.

 

You both survive the blast, but you have to carry Nat out of the rubble and away from the recon teams there to confirm your death.

 

She is so much smaller this way, without her grandstanding and her jokes and her fierceness. For the first time you see her as fragile.

 

The familiar feeling of a need to protect wells up inside you, and so you carry her for miles. At one point you feel her shift and think she wakes up, but she either returns to sleep or an excellent facsimile of it. You smile and continue on.

* * *

 

 

_Bucky?_

_Who the hell is Bucky?_

Death no longer holds meaning for you.

* * *

 

 

You want to apologize to them, Sam and Nat, hell even Fury and Hill, because you always knew where this was heading.

 

Sam figured it out, because he knew what it was like to love someone and have them taken from you, to watch them be taken from you, and to know it was your fault. He is a good man. A man you wish you could know better, but you do not plan on coming back from this one.

 

Nat wants you to be detached, to just forget about the face of the Soldier and remember that he is Hydra’s gun, nothing more. But Bucky is branded onto your soul, and you owe him a blood debt for letting him fall.

 

Fighting him is the hardest thing you have ever done. You have to take down the helicarrier no matter the cost. Selfishly, you want to throw it all away for one man. _Screw the many_ , you think guiltily, but you still put the chip in place. Then you stop fighting entirely.

 

“You know me,” you say, pleading and hoping and praying.

 

He doesn’t.

 

“Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.” You are thrown unexpectedly into a memory of begging Phillips for the names of the dead, _James Buchanan Barnes. B-A-R-_ , you brought him back from the brink of death that time, why not once more?

 

“I’m not gonna fight you.” And you don’t. You think, as you feel a crack and your cheekbone caves in slightly, that Bucky may actually be able to kill you. _Well, we always did say til the end of the line._

 

“I’m with you to the end of the line.”

 

This is it, the end of it all, and you think you see a spark of something in his eyes before you fall unconscious.

* * *

 

 

You wake up on a beach in disbelief.

* * *

 

 

You wake up in a hospital knowing he saved you.

* * *

 

 

You feel that same feeling again, what you felt when you decided to save Bucky and the other men in his unit.

 

Bucky saved you and now you can save him. Purpose.

 

Sam comes with you and Nat doesn’t, and you think she knows. She is trained to read people and she must be able to see the mania in your eyes, read your reckless streak for what it truly is.

 

You think there is something else there, too, that maybe she has come to love you, too. She is a much better soldier and spy than you are, and she knows how dangerous it is to love someone. You will miss her, because she has that some tiredness in her that you do, the exhaustion of a person who knows they have lived more years than they should have, a person who death has no hold over.

 

“You might not want to pull on that thread,” she warns you, but she brought you the intel all the same.

 

But this thread has been pulling you since you were just a kid in Brooklyn.

 

You open the folder and see his frozen face.

 

_Born in Brooklyn, fought in the war, died in the war, frozen for decades, awoken in this unfamiliar and unforgiving world._

_Talk about shared life experience,_ you think ruefully.

 

You and Sam go in search of your ghost. 

* * *

 

 

Your search is interrupted, not that you were getting anywhere, by Hydra resurgence and an egotistical robot and another earth-threatening calamity.

 

“I’m not leaving this rock with one civilian on it.”

 

_I’m sorry, Bucky, sorry I didn’t find you, sorry I didn’t save you._

“There’s worse ways to go,” Nat says, and you see reflected in her eyes the same tired defiance of death.

 

_Yes,_ you think, _worse ways to go than dying with a friend._

 

But you don’t die in Sokovia, and neither does she.

 

Pietro does, and you are so shocked and sorry, but almost comforted that death actually can catch up with any of you.

 

You decide to lead this new incarnation of the Avengers, but you still spend your nights searching for him, hoping that if and when you find him it will all finally be over, but knowing in your heart it will not. 

* * *

 

 

It’s almost like a miracle that in the end, he finds you.

 

“Your pal, your buddy, your Bucky,” Rumlow says, before he blows himself to hell along with a dozen good and innocent people. He is right, Bucky does belong to you. You are responsible both for all that has been done to him and all he has done.

 

“And… all of a sudden, I was a 16-year-old kid again, in Brooklyn.” It’s true, but not entirely.

 

You were sixteen, you were ten, you were twenty-four, you were in Brooklyn, in Italy, on a train in the Alps, on a bridge in D.C. Through the years you have loved and lost him, and you have still not made it right.

 

You see now, looking at her, that beneath all that power Wanda is just a child. Now she has blood on her hands and you want to just say the right words and make it better.

 

“This job,” you start, “We try to save as many people as we can. Sometimes that doesn’t mean everybody. But if we can’t find a way to live with that, next time… maybe nobody gets saved.”

 

_Do you want to kill Nazis?_ Erksine had asked you, a lifetime ago.

 

You never wanted to kill anyone.

 

Vision materializes through the wall before Wanda can say anything back to you.

 

Despite your words, you know that just trying to save as many people as you can isn’t good enough. You never believed in a great scale which can weigh lives against each other, not in the war, not before, not after.

* * *

 

 

Peggy dies, and it leaves just you and Bucky, two men flung out of time.

 

He is the only one left who could know you now, could remember.

 

At Peggy’s funeral you think of everyone you have left behind, your mother, the Commandos, Erksine, Phillips, your whole neighborhood, your whole life. The dead are legion, and they are still waiting for you to join their ranks.

 

_Not without Bucky_ , you think, knowing you at least owe him that.

* * *

 

 

He remembers you, you see it in the journal and in the look in his eyes and you think for a moment that it just might be enough.

 

“It always ends in a fight,” he says, shattering your short-lived idealistic day-dream, and you know that for the both of you that will always be true. You were born in the wake of one war just to grow up and fight in another. Violence was never going to leave you alone.

* * *

 

 

You fight with and against your former brothers and sisters in arms and allow them to be hurt, beaten and sent to prison. They all trust you and believe in you, fighting for justice, for truth, for freedom.

 

And all you can think is _for him, for him, for him._

* * *

 

 

You tell him it wasn’t his fault, that he didn’t have a choice, but what you want to tell him is to blame you, blame you for all of it because you did this, and it is not him that isn’t worth all of this, it’s you.

* * *

 

 

Zemo wins, in the end.

 

You don’t want to fight Tony, truly, but there is not a single cell in your body that could let him get to Bucky.

 

“He’s my friend,” you say, meaning _he’s my everything, he’s my family, he is all that I have left._

 

“So was I,” Tony replies, and you want to scream at him _Yes! You are! But can’t you see I have no choice?_

 

You can’t kill him, never could, even though you see a little bit of your own desperation in him.

 

You leave the shield and take Bucky, and your tired body wishes this were the end of it all.

 

_It always ends in a fight._ Bucky’s voice echoes in your mind.

* * *

 

 

Bucky goes back under, and you are happy for him, really and truly, because maybe he will be able to find some peace.

 

However.

 

You wish more than anything to be going under, too. You fear returning to the ice, but the peace and the escape tempt you.

 

You miss him, the feeling like a constant itch in your heart.

 

You rescue your friends and send a letter to Tony hoping that someday you can atone for all you’ve done.

* * *

 

 

You visit him sometimes, at first just to see him safe in the cryo chamber, and to talk to Shuri and the other techs about how the work on his brain is coming along.

 

Later, once all the triggers in his head have been dismantled and he can be safely woken up you go and see him more often. He refuses to come with you outright, though you never asked him to and never would, and it strikes you how different this man is from the one who followed you into the jaws of death 70 years ago.

 

Sometimes he remembers a lot, and you talk about the time before the war and you feel the vestiges of the string that used to connect you, back when you were the same soul in different bodies. Time and space and pain have separated you, but you still love him like you used to.

 

“Did we used to…” he says, trailing off, and a million different possibilities of the end of that sentence pop into your head. Your heart clenches and you don’t know if you can actually physically survive him asking if you were lovers.

 

“…cuddle?” he finishes, visibly confused, his forehead crinkling in concentration.

 

You sigh, either in disappointment or relief, “We did, yeah, back when it would get real cold in the apartment and there weren’t enough blankets to keep us warm.”

 

“I remember how small you were,” Bucky says hesitantly, not meeting your eyes, “it was like you were made to fit in my arms.”

 

To your alarm and surprise, you feel tears well up in your eyes.

 

It is nothing like it used to be, and it never, ever can be, but you can see yourself staying here with him however he will have you if only to maybe, someday, feel his arms around you again.

 

_After,_ you think. 

* * *

 

 

Nat visits you sometimes, though you have no idea how she finds your underground safe houses.

 

Occasionally she helps out with missions, but most of the time she just comes for a few hours to see you, and sometimes Sam, too, and then vanishes without a trace.

 

“You ever think about what comes after all this?” you ask her once, and she gets that look on her face that means you asked a stupid question.

 

“There is no after for people like us, Steve. There’s no retirement home for superheroes.”

 

“That’s a bit bleak.”

 

“It’s realistic.”

 

When faced with the exact words you have been telling yourself since Bucky fell from that train, you find yourself unable to accept them. You cannot believe in a world where Natasha is gone before her hair turns grey.

 

“All we can do is hold on to what we have, hard, and do our best to keep it safe,” she says.

 

She sounds so much like Peggy that the love you have for her finally makes sense. Nat would never admit to loving you. _Love is for children,_ she said. But she does. You know what love looks like in a person who knows the taste of death but cannot touch it.

 

“Well I think it’s about time for us to retire,” you joke.

 

She laughs.

* * *

 

This winter is worse than any other you can remember. The cold air freezes in your nose and your mouth before it can reach your lungs. Your breathing is like a quiet whistle, a reserved sound for the relentless struggle to breathe.

 

Bucky had stayed up for far too long, sitting on your bedside and pushing your hair off your sweaty forehead, obviously searching for something useful to do.

 

Whenever you got sick he always sacrificed parts of his meals so you could eat more, sacrificed his sleep to make sure you were alright even though he had to work early in the morning, sacrificed his comfort using his own body heat to keep you warm.

 

You know he does it because he loves you, but you don’t want to continue to be a burden on him.

 

You hear his steady breathing, strong and even unlike the wheeze and whistle of your own and consider just getting up and creeping out of the apartment without him knowing. The cold would probably kill you in a matter of minutes, not the worst way to go. He would be sad, of course, but he would recover, and without you he would be able to do so much more. Find a girl, settle down, have a few kids.

 

You sit up, a herculean effort, and stand. You only manage a few steps before a floorboard creaks and Bucky’s breathing is interrupted. He wakes with a start.

 

“Steve?” he says, groggy and confused.

 

“Yeah, Buck, it’s me. Just getting some water.”

 

“You cold?” he mumbles.

 

You know in that moment that you will never be able to do it, because you are selfish, and you cannot give him up, even for his own good.

 

“Yeah.”

 

He gets up and stumbles over to you, practically carrying you to your bed. Bucky waits for you to lay down and then lays down next to you and fits his body around yours, his arm around your waist, his knees fitting into the backs of yours, his breath on your neck.

 

You nestle into his warmth and decide to live, if only to know the feeling of being held in his arms.

 

You sleep well for the first time all winter.

* * *

 

“We don’t trade lives,” you say, and all you can think is what Bucky would say if he were here right now.

 

_Really, Steve? “We don’t trade lives”? I have never met a more suicidal maniac than you! You were willing to die for cats._ Cats, _Steve! Do you want me to start listing off all the times you have been willing to trade your life for someone else’s? It’s a pretty damn long list, pal, you might want to sit down because I can do this_ all day.

 

You remember a conversation with Wanda which feels a lifetime away. _Sometimes that doesn’t mean everybody,_ you said. _Bullshit_ , you think. You are not going to put more blood on her hands. You don’t kill to escape your problems.

 

Vision smiles at you, softly and sadly, disappointed and yet also glad to be considered a life.

 

Everyone else either sighs in relief or resignation, but no one raises any objection.

 

You sigh, too, and go to the fight thinking that maybe, just maybe, this one might be the last.

 

_One last mission_.

 

One last fight.

 


End file.
